Right Livelihood Part 2 – Business in Meat
By Jennafer Duerden
The Buddha told his disciples, "Monks, a lay follower should not engage in five types of business. Which five? Business in weapons, business in human beings, business in meat, business in intoxicants, and business in poison. These are the five types of business that a lay follower should not engage in." In part 1 of this article, I discussed the concept of Right Livelihood when it comes to the choice we make in our career. In this second part, I’d like to look at it from the perspective of ethical consumerism. For Right Livelihood is not only the choices we make in our own work but how and whether we choose to support others in theirs. Does contributing to industries or individuals profiting from the five ‘wrong’ livelihoods make us just as culpable?
Meat and Poison
My personal decision to live for the majority of my life on a vegetarian, and more recently, a vegan diet, is something I rarely discuss with other people. The reasons behind this decision are many and complex and I’m happy to share them with anyone that’s curious but over the years I’ve discovered a very specific type of aggression that many people harbour towards us herbivores. Countless times in restaurants with acquaintances or at dinner parties I’ve been told that my diet is unnatural and unhealthy and I’ve heard many and varied justifications as to why people consume meat: ‘I buy organic anyway, the animals don’t suffer’, ‘I need a high protein intake because I work out’ or the best of all, ‘who cares about dumb animals anyway?’. I won’t go deeply into the many health benefits of veganism here (far lower risk of cancer/heart disease/multitudes of other illnesses scientifically proven to be caused by meat and dairy consumption). Instead, I’ll focus on how this industry is in direct conflict not just with the Buddha’s guidance of not engaging in the business of meat but also in the business of poisons and how our diet can affect not just ourselves but the world around us.
In the ‘食肉戒’1 or ‘precept of eating meat’, the Buddha tells us, ‘a carnivorous person destroys the seed of the Buddha nature by relinquishing great compassion. All sentient beings that see them will flee from them. Thus, all Bodhisattvas must not eat the meat of any sentient being’. A central concept of Mahayana Buddhism is compassion for others. Although many people would agree that compassion for our fellow human beings is a positive thing, for many this compassion does not extend to our animal friends. I’ve always found this logic rather curious. Animals are sentient beings, they are conscious and able to feel pain and suffer. When we eat meat, we are directly supporting an industry that subjects others to unthinkable cruelty and pain. How can we align this with our Buddha nature?
I decided of my own accord to become vegetarian at the age of 10, quite suddenly one day having eaten a tin of corned beef and thinking what horrific practices must lie behind the process of transforming a cow into a canned good. The link between being a compassionate ‘animal lover’ and a vegetarian was already quite clear to me as a child. However, having maintained a steady scepticism for the best part of 20 years, the decision to become vegan took me a lot longer. Part of my scepticism stemmed from the belief that eating eggs and dairy doesn’t involve eating or killing animals and therefore, as long as one buys free-range organic produce, one is not involved in any kind of malpractice against sentient beings. This was a belief I fundamentally challenged and overturned as a result of a lot of research into these industries and after watching many documentaries. In fact, for each punnet of eggs you consume, many male chicks are killed, often ground up alive or dumped in mass in refuse. Males don’t lay eggs and only a few are needed to fertilise hens and chickens are expensive to rear, eating into farmers’ profits.2 It’s a similar story for milk. Male calves, surplus to requirements, are either slaughtered or, even crueller, used to produce veal, a process in which a calf is kept in a cage and starved to prevent muscle growth. Life also isn’t so rosy for dairy cows; without calves to rear (they’ve been removed for slaughter) cows stop producing milk and have to be artificially inseminated for the duration of their lives, producing milk not for their young but for another species to drink.3 My research led me to discover that I’d been fooling myself for a long time, unable to see things as they really are for the sake of my convenience and culinary pleasure. I asked myself, am I culpable for the cruelties of this industry and the suffering of sentient beings? After all, the animals aren’t being directly slaughtered for my consumption and the blood is on someone else’s hands. Ultimately, however, on self-reflection I do feel deeply culpable. Consuming dairy and eggs meant I was still indirectly supporting the meat industry and a ‘wrong’ livelihood. Without consumption there is no demand, and my consumption of these products was ultimately leading to suffering. This also highlights the importance of life-long curiosity and learning; we always have the potential to deeply examine our consumerism and the effect it has on the world and we can always strive to live with the mentality of Right Livelihood.
How is the business of poison related to the meat industry? It is estimated that 77% of all land in the world is used for livestock.4 Not only does this have a massive impact on biodiversity and deforestation, the meat industry creates massive amounts of greenhouse gases, leading to severe impact on global warming and soil degradation. These emissions are more than double the entire emissions of the USA and represent 35% of all global emissions.5 In the USA particularly, one of the world’s largest consumers of meat, the environment is being constantly poisoned by toxins as a by-product of this industry, causing the destruction of wildlife and impacting human health. As the Environmental Protection Project describes, slaughterhouse waste ‘contaminates rivers and streams in rural America with pathogens, oxygen-depleting pollutants like nitrogen and phosphorus, and other contaminants like sulphates and chlorides. When released into waterways in high concentrations, these pollutants drive excess algae growth, feed “dead zones” that suffocate aquatic life and turn waterways into bacteria-laden public health hazards’.6 As animals are factory farmed to cope with the massive demand for meat, they are pumped full of antibiotics and chemicals to try to keep them healthy and grow normally in abnormal conditions. Carcasses are cleaned with toxic chemicals to remove pests. These poisons are then consumed by the humans that eat them.
It is clear then that supporting the business of meat also directly supports the business of poisons in the form of antibiotics and chemicals as well as indirectly supporting the pollution of our environment and even the poisoning of ourselves. It is an industry in direct conflict with the idea of a compassionate Buddha nature. To view it on a more philosophical level, the animal kingdom is also one of the six realms of rebirth. Perhaps eating masses of meat might cause us to be reborn in the next life as a dairy cow…what horrors we would have to endure. Perhaps somewhere in a past life we or our ancestors were part of the animal kingdom. As the Buddha told Mañjuśrī, ‘There is not a single being, wandering in the chain of lives in endless and beginningless samsara, that has not been your mother or your sister. An individual, born as a dog, may afterward become your father. Each and every being is like an actor playing on the stage of life. One’s flesh and the flesh of others is the same flesh. Therefore the Enlightened Ones eat no meat.’ 7
The journey from meat-eater to vegetarian to vegan was a long one for me, spanning around 30 years. I’m fully convinced that the Buddha was right in his recommendation to not support the meat industry. For the record, at 37, I’ve never been fitter and healthier than I am now on a plant-based diet and many blood tests have confirmed that I have no deficiencies. I can firmly say I am truly an animal lover and can look all of our fellow sentient beings, large or small, in the eye without feeling remorse. I’m very careful in the way I talk about veganism as so many people maintain a kind of cognitive dissonance and refuse to learn more about the many benefits to the world of changing their diet. I believe the best way is to lead by example and carefully provide information to curious friends. If you’re reading this and you’re not already a vegetarian or vegan, I’d invite you to take some time to read about it with an open mind.
